Poundbury, in the outskirts of Dorchester is a toytown for Prince Charles. Here his architectural views have been given reign. It is an ‘unashamedly traditional’, low, zoning-free faux Georgiania, of car-less dream alleys and not-too-high towers, a market-town fantasia... The paths are gravel for appearances’ sake, for the sake of the picture: that gravel spreads and is a nightmare for pushchairs does not matter.
Many of the 25-year-old exteriors of Poundbury have been constructed with fake bricked-up windows, emulations of the real avoidance-mechanism dating from the 1696 Window Tax.
In Poundbury, strict rules disallow illuminated signs, or clothes-driers, aerials, metres, air extractors, ventilation openings, dustbins, solar cells being visible from the street. And yet here are unwindows, a facile and putrid kitsch homage to a devastating, unsanitary and hated repressive measure, that condemned people to unventilated darkness, is a tasteful detail.
Here, the bad picturesque lives, or is at least undead.
from Skewing the Picture, by China Mieville.